Programmable button speeds triage process for faster heart attack care
One-click technology streamlines a key step in assessing patients
presenting with chest pain
Date:
March 24, 2022
Source:
American College of Cardiology
Summary:
Shaving critical minutes off the time it takes to diagnose a heart
attack and begin treatment could be as simple as the push of a
button. Using a programmable button to page a phlebotomist for a
blood draw reduced the time it took to identify patients suffering
a heart attack by more than 11 minutes on average, in a new study.
FULL STORY ========================================================================== Shaving critical minutes off the time it takes to diagnose a heart attack
and begin treatment could be as simple as the push of a button. Using a programmable button to page a phlebotomist for a blood draw reduced the
time it took to identify patients suffering a heart attack by more than
11 minutes on average, in a study presented at the American College of Cardiology's 71st Annual Scientific Session.
========================================================================== According to researchers, the study represents the first time programmable button technology -- designed to help consumers easily order products
online - - has been applied in a medical setting.
"Often in medicine you need a rapid response, but there are many processes
that require numerous laborious steps that take time, and in the setting
of a potential heart attack, time is muscle. The longer the wait, the
more damage there is to the heart muscle and less chances for recovery,"
said Milind R.
Dhond, MD, medical director of cardiovascular medicine at NorthBay
Healthcare in Fairfield, California, and the study's lead author. "This approach potentially can cut out many steps. It's using innovative
technology in an innovative way by bringing together the technology and
the application to improve the process." To diagnose a heart attack,
doctors look at the level of troponin in the blood as an indicator of
damage to the heart muscle. Drawing blood and sending it to the lab for analysis is integral to the process used to determine whether a heart
attack is occurring before clinicians intervene to open the blocked
artery.
Researchers adapted the Internet of Things (IoT) button developed by
Amazon Web Services to page an on-call phlebotomist for a blood draw
whenever a patient arrived in the hospital's emergency department with
chest pain. The device is a physical, handheld button that communicates wirelessly, triggering a pre- programmed process when pressed -- a
process similar to the "Buy now with 1- click" option Amazon developed
for its web-based product ordering system.
Having the button handy allowed triage nurses to rapidly summon a
phlebotomist for patients with chest pain while continuing the rest of
the patient intake process.
For the study, researchers compared the records of 2,098 patients
who presented to the NorthBay emergency department with chest pain
between January 2020 and April 2021, when the IoT button was in use,
with records from 1,614 patients who presented to the same emergency
department with chest pain in 2019 prior to the implementation of the
button. The demographics and cardiovascular risk factors of the two
groups were similar.
========================================================================== Analysis showed that use of the button significantly reduced the time
it took to diagnose a heart attack by an average of 14%. The largest
gains were in the period between the patient's arrival at the emergency department and when the nurse ordered a troponin test, which was reduced
by an average of seven minutes after the button was implemented.
Using the button also reduced the time between placing the order and
having blood drawn by 2.5 minutes and the time between drawing blood and delivering the sample to the lab by about two minutes, on average. There
was no significant difference in the time it took to receive lab results
once the blood sample arrived at the lab for analysis.
The total process from start to finish was about 11 minutes shorter after
the IoT button was implemented, representing an increase in efficiency
given that hospitals aim to begin interventions to open a blocked artery
within 60 minutes or less after a patient arrives at the hospital with
a heart attack.
"We were pleasantly surprised to see quite a significant reduction in
time just by introducing such a simple concept," Dhond said. "If you get
the lab results sooner, you can admit the patient sooner or discharge
them sooner." Dhond said that the approach should be scalable and cost effective for a variety of other time-sensitive areas of health care
delivery, such as cardiac arrest and stroke treatment.
The study was limited to a single medical center and used a retrospective analysis as a control, although researchers noted that the study's
large sample size strengthens the conclusion that the button resulted in significant improvements. Researchers noted that the hospital's cardiac
testing protocols did not change in response to the COVID-19 pandemic,
which emerged a few months after the button was implemented, and said
it was unlikely that the pandemic had any effect on the study results.
Dhond will present the study, "Novel Use of Amazon 1-Click Button to Significantly Reduce Time to Diagnosis of Acute Myocardial Infarction
in Emergency Department Patients," on Saturday, April 2.
========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by American_College_of_Cardiology. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
==========================================================================
Link to news story:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220324104422.htm
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